Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Words from Elder Chandon Herring in Washington DC

Happy birthday Madi!!!!!!! That is enough itself to prove this was a great week! Love you!

Tuesday... Today was a good day. We went to the DC stake center for the zone district meeting. We had to give a training on being safe with the sun going down at 5 o'clock. It went super well there was good discussion and we were able to clear up the policy the mission has. President gave a good workshop on how to teach in the Lords way. We then spent the rest of the day sitting down working on transfers and language program meetings to make sure that this coming transfers is as effective as it should be.

Wednesday... Temple trip! Today we were able to go to the temple and it was wonderful! It is such a blessing to go as often as we do. I hope it carries over to after my mission. After the temple we went to the mission office for staff meeting it was good and same as always we were able to get a lot done and organize for the transfer. After the meeting we sat down and worked on apartments for the transfer to see where we needed to fill or where we could close. We got quite a bit done. It was sad in the aspects that a missionary is being sent home. He elected to go home himself. It is really sad I served around him for a while and he was a good missionary and had a lot of potential. We then switched over to a Chevy Cruz it's our new car so we have a CD player again and can now go ham on Christmas music. :)

Thursday... This was the day that the transfer mess began. we went to bed around midnight. But overall the day was really good. We've been doing super good getting to our studies on time and having real learning experiences. I absolutely love that time! We then went to the Silver Spring zone district meeting where we did the same presentation that we did on Tuesday. It went a lot better today since we had some practice:) President went to give his and he was on one! it was weird he was kind of snippy and super intense. Really powerful though. We're not sure why but it was good! And then later in the day I began my mass email of guilt. The guilt is on my part I hate asking parents for money. I had to send emails to the parents of all the missionaries to figure out paying for iPads. Lots of them have had them paid for. But there are quite a bit that have not and I just feel awful asking them to send us $381. Don't worry mom and dad mine is paid for :-) we then looked at the transfer board again. We are super lucky we found a mistake that we made, we put a Spanish trainee with an English trainer glad we caught that one!

Friday... Today was when I got my official first experience of signing a lease. Well the process that leads to that. We're not quite to that point but were working on it :-) we had a good amount of free time this morning that we were able to catch up on everything. we made all the whitewash packets for transfers and a lot of the agendas. We also have the trainer meeting where we help the Trainers get ready for this coming transfer. We have a really good group this time and I'm excited to see what they do. We had a super good discussion and we were able to get them fired up. We had a good lesson to end the night at the VISITORS CENTER. We met with Gabe a super cool story he literally walked into church and said he wanted to be baptized. We taught him the new member lessons and he really needed to talk.

Saturday... Today my dear little sister turned 18 she is a stinker but she's cute :-) we went early in the morning to the Silver Spring stake center to do a presentation with the cooks. Sister Cooke asked Elder Ord and I to share our stories about why we came on our mission and what we had at home. The Silver Spring stake was doing a missionary day for their primary so there was a ton of 8 to 11-year-olds there. It went really good and we were able to help them see that we are normal people :-) and guess what surprise! We went to the mission office and kept working on transfers! But what made it even better was we were able to have lunch at Café Rio! It was a good night because as we were winding down and getting ready for bed Elder Ord and I had a really good talk. It's good to get to know him better and be more comfortable around him he is still really weird but I love the guy.

Sunday... So our bishop is incredible. We had our ward council meeting early in the morning and we talked about the churches statement clarifying apostasy. Our bishop fosters such a wonderful learning environment. He asks incredible questions and gets the council talking about these issues. It was very peaceful and the spirit was there to testify of the truthfulness of this direction that we are receiving and that there is a living prophet on the earth. It just shows that the church does not plan on changing their stand there anytime soon. We were able to stay for sacrament meeting but then we had to drive out to Glendale for the baptism of Amir and Roxanna. It was absolutely wonderful they're great people! I was able to baptize Roxanna. She doesn't understand a lot of English so Amir translates everything for her but when Amir was sharing his testimony she was standing in the back crying. It's just so touching because all she goes off of is when she feels the spirit. They are incredible, I mean they read the book of Mormon in two weeks! Really!?! Then we had dinner at the Cook's house and had to eat quickly because we had to go to the Chevy chase chapel for a ward mission training. It went really well and the presentations were great. It is just a good way to see the ward missionaries that we have and the ones that we have that are so devoted. We are spoiled in the Rockville ward because we have just incredible ones.

So that was another week in the greatest mission in the history of life. we're loving it here and getting a lot done. This week will be fun with transfers and then Thanksgiving in the next couple weeks. I love you all so much and hope you have a great week!